Public Sun/Arendt's Table
Sculptural installation for Beyond the World's End, curated by T.J. Demos, at the Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, opening: March 6, 2020, closing one week after
Experimental Greenhouse created by Sue Carter’s sustainability lab at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum using the same pigmented material.
The solar pipeline consists of four stacked sections supporting a transparent red fiber optic material developed by researchers Sue Carter and Glen Alers in Santa Cruz, and implemented in experimental greenhouses. This material transforms green light into red, generating an electric charge and providing a selectively enhanced light spectrum that supports photosynthesis. Diatoms are microscopic photosynthetic organisms that make up the particular composition of the Monterey shale formation, that lies under California. "Consent not to be a single being" is a quote from Edouard Glissant, re-quoted by Fred Moten. The table represents only a fraction of the multispecies worlds with whom we share relations.
Hannah Arendt (in The Human Condition, 1958), describes the public realm abstractly as that which “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.” This “common world” as she called it necessarily relates and also separates—allows us to feel and negotiate our differences while sharing the same space, and deters us from withdrawing into privacy and isolation in the face of conflict. But she also wrote, in 1958, that this realm had disappeared: “…the weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible…”
This project proposed to re-create Arendt’s table as a model for a multi-species common world and public realm that expands beyond Arendt’s humanist perspective to include non-humans, and the non-living, material world, in the process of planning for a just and sustainable future.